A Rock Fell on the Moon: Dad and the Great Yukon Silver Ore Heist

By Alicia Priest

In its heyday in the 1950s and ’60s, the remote community of Elsa, 300 miles north of Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory, was the epicentre of one of the world’s most lucrative silver mining operationsan enterprise that far surpassed the riches produced during the iconic Klondike gold rush. For twelve of those years, Gerald Priest was the chief assayer for United Keno Hill Mines (UKHM), the major player in the region. Priest was a clever man who could as easily carry the role of refined gentleman as he could rustic mountain man. As far as ten-year-old Alicia Priest was concerned, her father Gerry’s life in Elsa was perfect: a home rich with music, books and pets where he never had to boil a kettle or wash a sock; a well paying job; a beautiful and affectionate wife; and two daughters who revered him as only little girls can. But as Alicia grows older, she realizes that perhaps her dad saw things differently, with four female dependents, an ailing wife who couldn’t give him the son he wanted, a religiously fanatical mother-in-law and a tedious, dead-end job.

Escape becomes possible when Gerry stakes the Moon Claims and discovers a phenomenal silver-rich boulderenough silver to make him and his family rich and fund their relocation south. But when Gerry tries to smelt and sell the ore, UKHM calls the RCMP. Too many things don’t add up: geologists find the former assayer’s boulder story improbable, the manpower required to hand-mine and transport seventy tons of rock across the Yukon terrain is beyond Herculean and most suspiciously, Gerry’s ore looks a lot like the ore found in UKHM’s Elsa mine.

In A Rock Fell on the Moon, Alicia Priest consults letters, news stories, archived RCMP files and court documents, and interviews with former mine employees, litigators and police investigators, to piece together the full story of her father’s infamous heist. The result is a lively, heartrending account of a mysterious crime that came extraordinarily close to succeeding; a fascinating look into the small mining communities that once thrived in the Yukon; and the personal story of the Priest family, who could only watch aghast as the life they knew crumbled around them. As she uncovers more of the story, Alicia must reconcile two different versions of her father: the fun-loving, bush-savvy adventurer who raised her, and the man accused and convicted of the Great Yukon Silver Ore Heist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
• Release date: Sep 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781550176735

Book preview

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A Rock Fell on the Moon

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A Rock Fell on the Moon

Dad and the Great Yukon Silver Ore Heist

Alicia Priest

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Copyright © 2014 Alicia Priest

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, [e-mail].

Lost Moose is an imprint of Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.

P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC, V0N 2H0

www.harbourpublishing.com

Front jacket, main image: Helen Priest, centre, with daughters Alicia, left, and Vona, 1958; Gerald Priest photo. Front inset: Gerald Priest, right, poses with friend George Esterer outside an abandoned Yukon homestead; Rob Stodard photo. Back jacket: Looking toward the Moon Claim, 1963; photo from author’s collection. Page ii: Left to right, Gerald, Helen, Alicia (holding Mitzi), Vona and Omi near their Elsa home c. 1960.

The poetry selections at the chapter openings all come from The Best of Robert Service (McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd., 1953) and Songs of a Sourdough (McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd., 1957).

Edited by Pam Robertson

Indexed by Brianna Cerkiewicz

Map, text and jacket design by Peggy Issenman

Printed and bound in Canada

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Harbour Publishing acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

978-1-55017-672-8 (cloth)

978-1-55017-673-5 (ebook)

For Ben and Charlotte

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Gerry, around 1951, early on in the employ of United Keno Hill Mines. GERALD PRIEST

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My, what big teeth you have! Caesar and Alicia, age six. Gerald Priest

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Prologue

Things Go South

Alas! the road to Anywhere is pitfalled with disaster.

It is so bad now because before it was so good. I’ve been kidnapped and taken far, far away, and the worst thing is, my own parents did it. Yesterday, August 29, 1963, I turned ten. Crouched in a shady spot under a shrub in the sun-baked backyard, I scrawl in my diary, writing out a scheme to run away from the cramped, dank East Vancouver basement suite I find myself living in with my grandmother, mother, older sister and one dog. I will return to my real home, a log house in Elsa, a remote Yukon settlement 300 miles north of Whitehorse. I’m not running away from home. I’m running to home. Where I have a real dad, caring friends, a cheerful school, the best dog in the world and my own room. Here, I’m not only sharing a bedroom with my sister, I’m sharing a bed. And where is Dad?

I’ll take any money I find in the house (so far $12.41), get to the airport and fly to Mayo where I’ll ask our friend Herb Zollweg to pick me up, drive me to Elsa and build me my own log cabin. I scribble another few words: Miserable. Life sad. Earlier, I found Mom’s ten-cent Hilary notebook, where she’d penned: Bad news! Still on radio. I was born in the Yukon, and having lived in Elsa all my life I know that home is more than a house and the people in it.

More than two months have passed since my abduction but all day, every day, I think only of my lost home. Elsa is so small and so nowhere it doesn’t make it onto most Canadian maps, but to my sister and me it is Grand Central Shangri-La. In Elsa, I’m free to wander, secure without being smothered, and experience the serene excitement of tramping alone through the tamed wilderness outside my doorstep. I know someday I’ll have to leave—our school only goes to grade seven—but until then, Elsa and I are inseparable. Shortly before the end of grade four, though, Dad announces we’re moving. Next week. Vancouver will be a temporary stop, he says, but then our lives will dramatically change for the better. Better? We’re gathered round the kitchen table—the hub of our northern home, where we eat together, play board games and have all manner of discussions and philosophical debates. It’s after supper and the well-worn wooden surface is clean and clear when Dad brings out an 8 × 10 black and white photograph of a sprawling two-storey house with a wide filigree porch spanning the long front side. The photo is taken from the air, capturing not only the house but sky-brushing full-leaf trees, forever lawns and flower and food gardens that stretch past the picture’s border.

Feast your eyes on our new home, my dears. In the rolling foothills of Alberta, ranching country but close enough to a city to keep your mother amused. He pitches her a wink. We’re dumbstruck, except Mom, who smiles reassuringly and strokes our heads and lets out a soft laugh. And this, he continues, pointing to a tiny window on the second storey, will be your bedroom, Vona. Over here, on the other side, will be yours, Alice.

I stare at a grainy square speck on the photo, unable to speak. But Vona manages to blurt out the question closest to her heart.

Can I have a horse?

A horse? he says. Of course. But why only one!

Vona beams. For the moment, the promise of having her very own steed (or three) has upstaged everything. The reality of leaving Elsa will hit her later.

Not me. I find my voice and shaky as it is I plead to please, please let us stay. At least until we finish grade six or seven. Do we have to move now? Why? What’s the big hurry?

A scowl darkens Dad’s face and then suddenly he brightens and sweetens the deal. Before we move to our grand new residence on acres of our own land, he will whisk me to Disneyland, an unheard-of fantasy vacation for a young girl in the 1960s, especially a Yukon girl. And Dad will take Vona on her dream trip—a horseback trek through the Rockies, a venture he has made three times before. We can’t finish the school year. We have one week to collect our school records, say goodbye to friends and pack one suitcase with clothes and essential treasures. Dad will stay behind to pack our belongings, find a good home for our tabby Mitzi and then join us with our long-haired, large and loyal to the point of death Belgian shepherd, Caesar. I have an enormous dog chart covering one bedroom wall with pictures of all the breeds. Although Caesar looks like an extra large and shaggy German shepherd, I am thankful he is a Tervuren Belgian shepherd because in the world we live in anything German is evil.

Dad carries me to bed, where Mom sits on the edge massaging my leg until I sink into sleep. In the morning, I wake with a twisted knot in my stomach. Something isn’t right, and then yesterday surges back. Unwilling to rise or open my eyes, I hear a nameless bird sing three long, single notes outside my open window: Twoo-dee-doo. Twoo-dee-doo. Do not leave. Do not leave, it chants. Later, when packing, I stuff that birdcall into a zippered pocket.

In three days, far less than the week we were promised, my mother, sister and I are thousands of miles away from everything familiar and holed up semi-below ground at 348 East Fortieth Avenue. At one end of the block cars race along a highway called Main Street. At the other end, a vast and alluring graveyard where shaved trees stand like soldiers spreads for blocks. I am repeatedly told not to venture there even though it’s the closet and largest green space around. Omi, my German-speaking grandmother, has tight connections in her Mennonite community, and one good friend, Mrs. Krause, a Russian-born war widow with impeccable Christian manners, takes us in. Dad arrives, two weeks later, but he’s left Caesar, our fully loaded Alsatian—another euphemism for German shepherd—who’s never known life on a leash, with his parents in Revelstoke. Caesar’s absence is a gaping gash in our family unit.

Dad is chipper, joking and affectionate, and flirts with Mom more than usual. Kisses to the back of her fawn-like neck. Love-slaps on her shapely bottom. But within days he’s gone again, saying only that he has some trouble to settle. He returns soon enough and once again promises that our fractured family will soon be whole. Fretting is verboten, he says airily. The day will never dawn when I allow the fruit of my loins to become city slickers.

But as summer slips into fall and we reluctantly start at a strange new school, it seems more and more as if he’s brought trouble back with him. My parents’ usual banter and coquettish, easy laughter has evaporated. They wear masks of hope but speak in low tones, glance at each other sideways and hold hands across the kitchen table late into the night, long after we’re in bed. Dad’s erratic comings and goings continue. And Mom frequently sits staring out the window or retreats to her room and closes the door for a rest.

In an attempt to stop our whining for Caesar, a friend of Omi’s gives us a white toy poodle puppy. We name him Pierre. We love animals, knowing they are individuals like people, only better. But the new dog isn’t a true dog and while I will grow to adore him, right now he doesn’t matter to me all that much. Pierre isn’t part of who we are and he never can be. The small knife-edge in my stomach that makes all food tasteless nestles deeper. As the days drag on, Mom’s explanations of what’s happening, where our new home is and when we will move grow weaker and finally peter out. Our home, our school, our neighbourhood, everything is still temporary, Mom says, but our dreams of paradise are gone.

Then stories begin to appear in the Vancouver Sun newspaper—one on the front page headlined Mystery Shipment of Silver Probed. Another declares Silver Mystery ‘International,’ referring to an Elsa mine that is the economic bedrock of the Yukon. The following week the Sun runs a story announcing that the rcmp are looking for a man in Vancouver in connection with the mystery shipment. The man is Gerald Henry Priest, 35, of Elsa, Y.T.

Ten-year-olds don’t read newspapers but similar reports are on the radio. The week I start grade five at Van Horne Elementary School on the west side of Main Street, a boy in my class asks if that Yukon guy in the news is my dad. No, we just happen to have the same last name. It is the first of countless lies I tell for years. When asked what Dad does for a living, I say he is a chemist and works for the government. When asked why he is never home, I explain he is a geologist and is up north exploring for diamonds. Or, one year, he is an engineer in Mexico helping set up a big manufacturing plant. Then in Toronto, consulting for an important company—he only comes home on holidays. When summer arrives and he still doesn’t show, I declare he’s riding cross the Rockies on horseback.

The truth—that one late summer afternoon, two men knock on our back door and I see Mom and Dad cling to each other before the men take Dad away; that over the next year and a half Dad is home one week and gone the next as he flies back and forth to the Yukon for a preliminary hearing and then a trial and then another trial; and that, subsequently, he is behind bars—is too disgraceful to reveal. Shame covers me like a shroud and my lips are sealed.

It is years before any of us know the facts, or at least a select few, about how Dad came heartbreakingly close to masterminding a massive silver heist from under the nose of one of the biggest mining companies in the country.

This is the story of what he says he did, what he appeared to do and how he most likely did it. It is also the story of what happened to us, his family, in the meantime.

chapter 1

Stopping for Smokes

No man can be a failure if he thinks he’s a success.

The morning of June 21, 1963 , a Friday, Al Pike glanced out his office window and spotted a fully loaded flatbed truck parked in front of the Elsa Cookhouse. In the Land of the Midnight Sun, it was the start of the longest and lightest day of the year and Pike, general manager of United Keno Hill Mines Ltd., had a clear, high-in-the-sky view of the idled rig, owned by the territory’s largest transportation firm, White Pass and Yukon Route. His gaze zeroed in on the load. The flatbed brimmed with hundreds of rock-filled sacks, smothered with a canvas tarp. The driver was nowhere to be seen—must have taken a break and walked the short jag to the Elsa Coffee Shop for a cup and a smoke.

As the wall clock ticked, Pike’s initial curiosity turned to alarm. Something was up and it wasn’t going down well. No UKHM transports were scheduled for that afternoon. If they had been, company trucks, not WP&YR, would do the hauling. Besides, the company packed its ore in containers, not sacks anymore, and there must have been more than two hundred sacks on that rig. Who had hired it? What was it carrying? And given that ukhm laid claim to near every square inch of soggy muskeg and stony slope in the Mayo mining district, where the hell did the rocks on that truck come from? He’d have to find the driver. Likely he was gabbing with the guys but whatever, he’d been in there now for more than twenty minutes.

Apart from its six operating mine sites, UKHM had about six hundred mineral claims, most of them dating back to the 1920s and ’30s. With little competition, company policy was to accumulate as many claims as possible, either through buying existing claims or, as some people put it, by waiting for the old-timers to die and then jumping on their claims.

A slight man on the minus side of medium with dark, shiny hair greased back in the fashion of the day, Albert Edward Pike was a powerful, pugnacious and widely disliked man. Arrogant, autocratic and cruelly dismissive, he was nicknamed Little Hitler by miners and other men, many of whom had emigrated from war-ravaged Europe. Employees stiffened and spoke only when spoken to when around Pike, then in his mid-fifties. They’d learned the hard way to keep their opinions and suggestions to themselves. The less said the better. Pike ran a tight ship. But it was under his watch that the vessel hit a squall.

Pike made life hell for anybody who worked there, recalled former UKHM chief geologist Al Archer, who worked in Elsa from 1957 to ’61 and then again from 1962 to ’65. And for most workers, there was precious little they could do about it. They simply had to take what Pike dished out. As Archer put it, People were trapped—they had no place to go.

Elsa sits smack in the middle of the Yukon Territory—in other words, beyond away. It was a significant locale at the time, however, as Elsa was the site of one of the most productive silver mining companies in the world. In its heyday in the 1950s and ’60s, UKHM was the second richest silver mine in Canada and the third richest in the world, spitting out up to 6 million ounces of silver per year—about a third of the nation’s total output.

Pike not only ran the mine, he ran the town of about six hundred people. A mining engineer who graduated from UBC in 1933 and toiled in several BC mines before going north, he became the UKHM mine manager in 1954 and was promoted to general manager in 1957. Through a chain of events that started with his sighting of that White Pass truck, Pike would leave the north the same year as Dad.

The mine is the town’s only reason for being, wrote author Jack Hope in his 1976 book Yukon. There are no other businesses or sources of employment… There is no elected town government; all that happens here is subject to the approval, or disapproval, of the mine manager.

On that portentous summer day, Pike assessed the situation outside, turned to his production manager Bruce Lang and pointed out the window.

Recognize that haul? he asked.

No, said Lang. I have no idea what it is or what it’s doing.

Well, you’re going to know about everything very soon. Get over to the coffee shop, drill that driver and find out who hired him, what’s in his load and where it came from.

But by the time Lang had covered the distance between the main office and the coffee shop, the White Pass driver was back in his truck and rumbling through town, hanging a curtain of dust behind him. The driver had 32 miles to go on a gravel road to hit Mayo, where truckers stopped for lunch at the Chateau Mayo Hotel before the exhausting haul to Whitehorse. Tidal waves of fine grit and windshield-cracking pebbles were hazards of summer transport. Drivers always turned their headlights on and many preferred to travel in winter when, ironically, visibility was better and ice and snow made the roads smoother.

As Lang entered the long log building that housed not only the coffee shop but the Elsa library, the barbershop and a beer parlour, cigarette smoke and high-level chatter filled the air. The volume dipped as soon as he entered. Addressing four fellows hunched at the counter, Lang said, Hey, anyone know what that White Pass driver was doing here?

Looks like he took a wrong turn, said one guy Lang recognized as an underground worker. He came in to get directions to Mayo. Must not be from around here.

Lang wasn’t the most popular member of the supervisory team and the workers hesitated to divulge anything that might get a buddy in trouble.

What was he hauling? Who’d it belong to? Lang said.

Never said, only that it came from some claims far side of Faro Gulch, past Keno.

Whose claims? asked Lang.

Didn’t say, volunteered a second man.

When Lang returned to the main office, Pike was standing by the phone.

As Lang relayed his meagre intelligence, Pike started dialling.

Pike here. I’ve got a job for you, he said into the receiver. No, no… will you just shut up and listen? There’s a White Pass semi loaded with ore sacks coming into town. When the driver stops for lunch grab me some samples. Five or six, minimum. I want them here on my desk first thing in the morning.

Later that afternoon, outside a Mayo café, a posse of men swarmed over the back of the White Pass truck, helping themselves to several chunks of rock. The next morning Pike scrutinized the samples, turning them over again and again in his hands. Perplexed and increasingly apprehensive, he called his geologist, Al Archer, and the next day drove up to Calumet to see him.

Know what this is? Pike said, thrusting a fine-grained, silver-grey chunk of raw ore into Archer’s right hand.

Without any hesitation, Archer replied, Do I? I know exactly what it is. And I know exactly where it comes from—the Bonanza Stope in the Elsa mine.

By that point, the WP&YR truck had chewed up the more than 250 miles between Mayo and Whitehorse, along with two other heavy-laden semis that had failed to come to Pike’s attention. In Whitehorse, their loads of sacked ore were packed onto two White Pass and Yukon railcars and carried over 110 miles and one international border through a mountain pass to Skagway, Alaska. There, once transferred to the 4,000-ton SS Clifford J. Rogers—the world’s first container ship—the ore sailed 1,645 miles down the British Columbian coast to Vancouver. At the West Indies wharf in North Vancouver, the sacks were once again pilfered and samples stolen—this time at the behest of a Vancouver-based consulting geologist named Aaro Aho—before traversing, again by rail, 722 miles to their final destination, the American Smelting and Refining Co. (ASARCO) in Helena, Montana.

Over the following month, Pike would be frantically preoccupied and would learn a great deal, all of a highly suspicious nature: three WP&YR trucks had picked up ore from a loading site on Duncan Creek Road, out of sight of Elsa; the drivers were directed to take Duncan Creek Road straight into Mayo, thereby bypassing Elsa completely, but one driver got turned around and stopped at the Elsa Coffee Shop for directions; the ore in question supposedly came from a group of claims called the Moon claims, a patch of scrub in the hinterland northeast of Keno; and, once smelted, the silver released from that ore would fetch more than $160,000, easily half a million dollars in today’s currency.

Most disturbing and indeed infuriating to Pike, the ore shipment was registered to Alpine Gold and Silver Mines Ltd., a company he’d never heard of. When all this information and more was relayed to UKHM vice-president and managing director P.N. Pitcher in Toronto, alarm begat action. In early July, Canada’s chief mining inspector, A.T. Jordon, visited Elsa. Shortly after, the head office of UKHM contacted the RCMP’s General Investigation Service in Toronto. The Mounties, in turn, called the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, which ordered ASARCO to hold off smelting the two railcars of ore pending an investigation.

On August 6, Inspector J.L. Vachon of the RCMP’s Whitehorse detachment announced an investigation into the odd ore shipment, which he believed was stolen from one of UKHM’s premier operating mines.

The next day, an unidentified Whitehorse RCMP spokesman hinted that the theft was the work of a skilled international ring.

On August 10, criminal charges were laid against the registered shipper of the ore, owner of the Moon claims and former chief assayer of UKHM—my father, Gerald H. Priest.

chapter 2

Unexplainable

We aren’t spliced according to the law.

They were a couple in contrast —a maddening mismatch. Not exact opposites, but different to such a degree that friends wondered why it took them so long to see the inaptness. Perhaps it was love-lust. Or simply a blind need nested so deep it hid like a slow-growing cancer from their consciousness. At least that may explain the long-lasting attraction and part of the impending disaster.

He was 6 foot 1. She was 5 foot 2. He wanted to be older. She yearned to be younger, and lied about her birth year to everyone,